Christmas Day

I love Christmas in London! The city is beautiful, everyone seems to celebrate (even Jews like me!), and I have a delicious lunch with my family in Clapham. Jeff is an excellent cook and he made turkey, veg, roasted potatoes, bread sauce, and chestnut stuffing. Yum!

Plus they had the best Christmas crackers ever! They all had windup penguins in them and they came with a racetrack, so we had penguin race. It was incredible amounts of fun!

Christmas-y tea cups. How wonderfully civilized!

After the penguin race, we went to the lounge for tea and dessert. I made the same cake as I made last year: a flourless chocolate cake made with almond flour and boiled oranges. It is delicious and remarkably like a normal cake, but richer and with the most amazing depth of flavor from almonds and oranges. Like last year, I coated the cake in a thin layer of buttercream and enrobed it in marzipan. I wanted to use fondant for the crisp white look I know my cousins love marzipan so I had to stick with that. While I'm not as happy with the almond-y off-white color and the slight green tinge it gave to the blue snowflake decorations, the flavor is really much better and it did look pretty darn gorgeous!

I also made meringues and chocolates (below are peppermint patties, raspberry truffles, and marzipan and apricot coins) to munch on. More on these and the cake to come soon!